My braceless days

1 April 2012

I had removed the hard neck brace for about a week and currently on and off put the soft brace on.  

Howwas I feeling?  Very mixed.  I was happy that I was closer to having a (hopefully) full recovery but the process is quite daunting 吃力.

Besides the dizziness and headache, I felt like I have a hollow of about the size of a basketball in my back. When I moved or used my arms, the senses, strength and stamina 耐力 gravitated towards 自然移向 the hollow and eventually got sucked into a black hole.  A 10 minute watering in the garden was sufficient to send me back to resting against some support.  

This put me in a dilemma 兩難 and I felt I was caught in a downward spiral.  When I used my muscles, the pains put me off. However, if I stopped exercising, I would not be able to rebuild my muscle strength, the absence of which was the source of the pains. Should I keep exercising orshould I have more rest?

These days at the physio, I was doing less than I had been able to before. At home, I was spending most of my time sitting in front of the computer resting against the high-back armchair, to the point that I found browsing the internet boring. What else could I do other than browsing the internet?

And, I had a lot of competing priorities 相爭的重要事項. Should I spend my time sleeping and resting? Should I spend my time on physio for my hand? Should I spend my time on physio for my back and upper body? Should I spend my time on exercises for my neck? Should I spend my time on Facebook and YouTas? Should I spend my time on online news? Should I spend my time on my two lovely dogs? Should I spend my time attending to household chores 雜務?

I prioritised 優先安排 my tasks using three criteria: things I must do, things I can do and things I enjoy doing. They were:

1.        Neck exercises (must do and can do)

2.        Hand exercises (must do and can do)

3.        Computer  - internet browsing, email, Facebook and YouTas (can do)

4.        Cooking (must do and enjoy doing but borderline on can do)

5.        Resting (must do)

6.        Back exercises (must do but hard to do).


The neck exercise was an hourly exercise and very slowly incremental. The exercises were paying off 回報 and now I could turn my head better to the left (roughly 20 degrees) and not so good to the right. This made me feel that I was starting to resume 恢復 normalcy.  

This is a photo of my hands. The one with the scar is the right hand and is visibly smaller than my left hand. The recovery progress has been encouraging. In terms of range and dexterity 靈活度 in the front, I would say it was 90% recovered but when folded back, it was still not good at all and more hard work was required. Strengthwise, it was still not ideal. I still could not open the cap of a new bottle of drink.  Given that I had had my full cast removed for slightly more than 4 months only, this was not too bad.